KILLING BABY HITLER, time-travel/alt-hist fantasy of Changing History...derailed by the Butterfly Effect

KILLING BABY HITLER
MICHAEL TOMASKY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the year 2141, the planet is ruled by billionaires, democracy is a relic, the environment is collapsing, and Illinois is home to thirty-foot alligators.

When a ragtag team of scientists discovers the secret to time travel, they set their sights on history’s most infamous villain: baby Adolf Hitler. The mission doesn’t go quite as planned.

Because rewriting history is never simple. Instead of preventing the rise of fascism, they trigger a bizarre new timeline in which Hitler grows up in America, editing one of the country’s most hateful newspapers, and history warps in strange and unsettling ways. What begins as a darkly funny scheme to fix the past spirals into a mind-bending journey across centuries, as the time travelers confront unintended consequences, shifting timelines, and a future that may be even worse than the one they left behind.

Part sci-fi thriller, part biting satire, Killing Baby Hitler is Michael Tomasky’s first work of fiction—a wildly original novel that skewers power, questions the logic of hindsight, and reminds us that the present may be the hardest time of all to change. Bold, provocative, and disturbingly plausible, it’s a time-travel tale like no other.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I like my silly sci-fi delivered with humor, so I'm your boy for this story's topic and style. I'm also a fan of time-travel (purest of fantasies) and alternate history (I dunno if we'll ever science our way into certainty that other timelines are real, but I think they can't NOT be), so bring your killing Hitler story unto mine eyes.

O/R is a leftist purveyor of tendentious reads mostly non-fiction; I approve of this, so seeing this novel become available I downloaded it immediately. I'm a fan of the wish-fulfillment inherent in stories of changing history, though the pop-culture "butterfly effect" is pretty inaccurate to the real subset of chaos theory. Doesn't mean I don't love to read about it. I was really hoping to love this read, too.

I enjoyed and liked it. I'd've loved it if it'd kept on with the initial tone. It's honest, abrasive, truthful about human nature; it's holding up our faults as people to us in this low-real life stakes fictional tale. It's always safe to look at existential crisis in the mirror of practical impossibility. To be able say humanity does not come off unscathed is pretty much my minimum standard for this kind of srory. Happy to say scathing is done. Pulling the punch at the end...well...I get it, I really do, and I can't tell you I thought the ending was incongruous, or tacked on to the story it was finishing off. It fit fine.

I wasn't expecting the tonal shift, so it popped me in the mouth for a minute. I don't think others who're less pessimistic, or permaybehaps don't see things through my Darkling eye. Without reservation a recommended read for summer in particular among the "if only" fantasists seeking to refashion the world. A well-paced story that makes its points without sacrificing the exuberant fun of reinvention, no matter how implausible.

Truths are told, honest self-appraisal encouraged, and a vote of confidence I don't entirely agree with is offered to send the entertainment reader away happy.

DOUBLE SHADOW, second Splinter Effect series time-traveling archaeologist story

DOUBLE SHADOW (Splinter Effect #2)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this thrilling installment of the Splinter Effect series, time-traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward returns to the past to help save his former adversary and track down a murderous thief in first century Jerusalem.

ROME, 2019. Time-traveling, Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward is back in the present, but not for long. Helen, his former adversary and growing ally, is in trouble with the law after being framed for a murder she didn’t commit. Stuck in hiding and running out of other options, she turns to Rabbit for help. "Help" in this case involves a trip to first century Jerusalem to track down a mysterious man named Einar Eshek.

But Rabbit won't have to do this mission alone; as soon as he arrives in 68 CE, he meets a younger version of Helen, one who has never met him before. Together, they work to track down Eshek, who turns out to be not only a time-traveling thief, but a murderous psychopath.

As they pursue Eshek through time, Rabbit and Helen feel something even bigger pulling them together. Torn between the two versions of the woman he knows, and with the clock ticking down on Helen’s fate in 2019, Rabbit might have no choice but to betray her past self to secure Helen’s safety in the future. Tensions rise as Jerusalem prepares to go to war with Rome, and Rabbit races to capture Eshek, clear Helen’s name, and make it back to 2019 in one piece—a feat that’s proving to be easier said than done—before everything falls apart.

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My Review: Author Ludington...are you stark staring mad?! In this absolutely bonkers passage in world history, which no matter how long the editing process on this story took you were writing while the US political landscape's ablaze with AIPAC news, you release a book set in a rebellious Judea! It's a choice....

So, aside from the geopolitical timing seeming to my eyes a bit on the nose, I was verschmeckeled at the twist of Rabbit...I really wish his nickname wasn't evocative of Rabbit bloody Angstrom, that pusillanimous milquetoast...encountering a younger version of his frenemy Helen from the first book. I know a lot of people who find time travel stories not to their taste for this very trope, to the point of not watching Doctor Who despite the glorious beauty of Alex Kingston as River Song, if you can imagine such masochism, because she meets the Doctor at asymmetric moments in each of their lives. "It can't happen! It's never happened!" Maybe...but don't you crave a Jake-and-Sadie moment from 11/22/63? I, clearly, do not share this cavil. In this particular iteration of the trope, I found a real aha! moment for some things in the first book. I really like that in a series story. I want to feel there are webs of interconnection that I sense but don't yet see because that happens in life as well.

So all that to say I found this story as much to my liking as it's ever gonna get when there are straight people centering it. Rabbit and Helen's dynamic in particular feels richly textured with powerful emotions clashing and shifting in each of them every time they meet. In this story, as Helen does not know Rabbit yet, we get the unedited version of her responses to him. If the fact she's trying to kill him says anything, it's something *good* about her character...she is a professional with clear goals. I admit that, as the story began, I was a bit surprised that Helen reached out to Rabbit for this specific kind of help, but it made perfect sense as I was swept along in the tides of developments. Einar Eshek, our villain, was villainous. Rabbit, our hero, was resourceful, determined, and required always to think on his feet; that's a feat any author who's using this character trait gets kudos from me the more successfully they pull it off. I didn't notice Rabbit navigating his altered relationship to Helen as awkward or forced into convenient resolutions to knotty conflicts. That is a rare compliment from someone like me, very experienced in reading series stories.

I found the resolution to the central conundrum...chasing Einar, exonerating *2018-Helen...fit the facts, satisfied the overarching plot, and resolved the immediate story tensions with a very clear intent to publish more of these characters' stories in the future.

Bring it. Soon, please and thank you.

YESTERYEAR, debut novel perfect for book clubs...and Anne Hathaway as Natalie comin' soon!

YESTERYEAR
CARO CLAIRE BURKE
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

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My Review: What a rotten human being Natalie is, phony, all about surfaces and appearances. And then one day, she's required to put in the effort she's faked for life as a momfluencer/farmfluencer. Remember Overboard, the 1987 film? Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as truly terrible people, lying, cheating, using people around them as objects. This story reminded me of that, with Outlander as the backdrop.

There is a thing called a "tradwife" on the internet. It's as brummagem as the "manosphere" the right-wing owners of major media outlets likes to insist is worthy of attention so their employees yap on about it. Natalie and Caleb, her husband, are mouthpieces for this made-up cultural phenomenon. As will surprise no one over forty, the couple are complete fakes: the lifestyle they present as aspirational, as somehow attainable, is a profit-driven collective endeavor of many minions and two public faces, supported by a cast of their minor children exploited as accessories, as decorative objects.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It's got elements of the whole Ruby Franke debacle, the various terrible men in the right-wing talk circles, the young kids trying to be famous on YouTube because that's what they see as fame...none of this is different than it's ever been. Classes, courses, camps, schools teching acting, writing, cooking...mor acccurately chefing...all have done this since who-knows-when but certainly since Carême parlayed his successes serving super-fancy vittles to the power elite of the Napoleonic era into a publishing empire. Others came before, I'm sure. Humans like looking up to people who do things flamboyantly and publicly because the spectacle is fun, because we like novelty, because we enjoy the inevitable fall from the heights. I myownself have never felt more intense schadenfreude than I did at the fall of Beau Brummell. The word "comeuppance" was only coined in 1859, but might as well have been invented for him...and for Natalie.

As Natalie awakens to the reality of her comeuppance, she becomes...authentic, at least briefly, in her intense desire to get back to being artificial, groomed, and pampered. She'll take the misogyny, the fakery of her persona's religious trappings, wrap herself in the cocoon of decepetions if it will bring her back to luxury behind the cameras. The hollow and unsatisfying Caleb of the modern day? Fine, compared to the sterner and more effortful relationship with her nineteenth-century Caleb; and how the hell does anyone get raised in a world without nannies? Natalie doesn't want to know.

I'm painting a portrait of a woman as obsessed with surfaces and self-absorbed as any Dorian Gray. She is just as awful as he was. We know this because we hear her inner monologue. We are left in no doubt that her responses are genuine because there is no camera to play to, no audience except us, the invisible readers she is speaking to.

I am definitely the audience for this story: anti-religion, revolted by the fameseeking culture depicted herein, accepting of a premise that promises weirdness in the form of time travel. But there are limits. Yes, Natalie and Caleb exist in the world...Ballerina Farm...but this story's got to do more than regurgitate the headlines to succeed. Does Author Burke have anything to add to the conversation? Or are we here for the fun of Natalie's comeuppance? The ending is designed to offer that perspective, I think, but it did not land with me. That's why I only offer four stars.

Not being perfect, not sticking the landing is not in any way meant to vitiate the real pleasures of the read. It's the kind of story that book clubs will engage with eagerly, much to chew on, much to consuder. I think you're wise to pick it up in that context; this is a story best experienced as a catalyst of discussion.

Debuts that attract Anne Hathaway to adapt and then star in their film are rare. I see why this one won that lottery. Find a group to read it with!

DETOUR: A Novel, first in a proposed series, ends on a cliffhanger

DETOUR: A Novel (Detour #1)
JEFF RAKE and ROB HART
Random House Worlds (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd never heard of the Netflix show Manifest before I picked up this DRC. I'd never heard of the imprint that publishes it, either, and I'm old enough that imprints matter to me. I track them and their subject-matter focuses so I can ask for DRCs I'm happy to read and review. Surprise! There's an entire LitRPG-inspired publishing world, that now subsumes to old movie novelizations and TV-show expansions. This had escaped my attention until now because I've never played these games. I got hooked on Dark Shadows novels and Doctor Who novels back in the day, but found most Star Trek novels pretty hit-or-miss, and gave up on them. So this rediscovery was pleasant because now I've watched Manifest and really like it. I hasten to add that this novel is reminiscent of the TV show's premise but is not directly related to the show you can see on Netflix.

This story started out with a cool-to-me hook: six random people are lightly trained after being plucked from richly deserved obscurity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan. Terrible, tragic explosions on their craft occur; they're brought safely back to Earth but them isolated from each other very stringently, instructed not to attempt to contact each other or to discuss their experiences.

From here we're in the PoV of the six people separately as they experience...oddness, off-kilter alterations in what their memories of Earth tell them should be present in the world around them. It is unsettling to them. The...can't call them changes, that implies violated continuity, can't call them alterations because that implies known agency...discontinuities in their realty versus their memories of reality are strange, undirected by a moral compass, some make things better some worse yet the people are left with a sense that they're suffering from Capgras Syndrome. I suppose you're already assuming the characters ignore, and circumvent, the orders to stay out of contact with their fellow survivors of the trip. Of course this is the case.

The *real* story here is in the returnees' efforts to provide each other with support, you aren't crazy the world is-level support. It's not a space-sci fi story at all; it's a Sliders-meets-Sliding Doors narrative of roads not taken. This ties in to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Hindu, and later Buddhist, concept of Indra's net. This is more fun for me as a reader but might very well cause some disappointment for others. Understanding going in that space travel and hard sci-fi are honored more in their absence as igniting events than bases for the continuing action will help you decide if this is the read for you.

As each character has unique struggles to adapt to their individual changed circumstances they're all, as a unit, required to look at the common underlying altered reality of the world they collectively remember. It's this facet of their experience that most recalls the earlier media franchises I reference in tge paragraph above. It creates among these six people, so randomly assorted and so very different in personality, training, and character, a found family with the most powerful ties imaginable. Their shared bedrock assumptions have been whisked out from under them.

It's in this that the authors choose to emphasize the shared nature of their trauma, and its developing coping mechanisms. The six PoVs are not dealt with chapter-by-chapter, which could easily lead to dilution and confusion among the characters, but with chapters that entertain similar attempts to cope by varying constellations of people. There are chat threads, emails, news articles, and other such media insertions into various parts of the narrative. This is a narrative technique as old as Tristram Shandy yet we still act as though this is somehow new and fresh and surprising. It worked beautifully in Stand on Zanzibar nearly sixty years ago. It still works now. Its worldbuilding is useful; the technique of said worldbuilding functions as commentary on both message and medium.

I was happy enough with the characters' varying arcs in this series-starting volume as they reached obviously temporary resolution points in some way. The story overall, of the gestalt formed by our six folks, ends on a cliffhanger. I'm now going to explain why, despite enjoying the read, I'm only giving it three and a half stars. Nowhere is it said that this is the first in a series of stories because publishers know how much many readers hate starting series that are not completed. Ask George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss why that might be the case; consult with Adam Christopher's novel publisher as to why amputating series before they conclude might result in blowback. (I want more Ray Electromatic stories!) So instead of learning the right lesson from this and publicly committing to the entire series in advance, greed rules and there's a tiny little detail omitted from the sales bunf in the hopes you will get hooked and buy them all as they come out. This is scummy.

I also detest cliffhangers because there is never a narrative reason for them. Ever. It's purely marketing. So, three and a half stars for those dickhead marketing-driven moves draining a lot of my pleasure in reading this iteration of a story whose bones I very much enjoy seeing fleshed out.

GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME, a modern Canterbury Tale

GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME
RYAN COLLETT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Less meets the year 1300 in this exhilarating and thoughtfully genre-defying literary novel about a man transported through time in a moment of extreme stress, whose modern anxieties are replaced by medieval brutalities

Newly laid off George’s internet bill is in his ex-boyfriend’s name. He’s got a spider-infested apartment, and two of the six dogs he’s walking in London have just escaped. It’s pure undiluted stress that sends him into a spiral, all the way to the year 1300.

When he comes to, George recognizes the same rolling hills of Greenwich Park. But the luxuries and phone service of modernity are nowhere. In their place are locals with a bizarre, slanted speech in awe of his foreign clothes, who swiftly toss him in a dungeon. Despite the barbarity of a medieval world, a servant named Simon helps George acclimate to a simpler, easier existence—until a summons from the King threatens to send his life up in flames.

George Falls Through Time is as much an inward journey as an outward one: an immersive exploration of identity and dislocation that pits present-day sensibilities against a raw and alien backdrop, a strangely perfect canvas for the absurd anxieties of our modern lives. It's a profound meditation on the nature of desire perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and The Ministry of Time.

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My Review: No one I've ever known is not in need of challenges to become their best self. Of course, like all other circumstances in this life, the challenge can be met, or lost, failed, or left with mixed results. I think the strength of this book is its calling-forth of George's inner winner.

What works less well for me is Simon, the medieval version of George's modern self-abnegating submissive self. At least in George Simon is serving a worthy master, a thing George never found in modern times. Simon doesn't have a PoV so we can't learn why he chooses to be this person to George, this being stream of consciousness, and George is quite understandably overwhelmed by the brain-bending reality he's in the reign of Edward I. George is, howsomever, a *major* whiner, which is a big part of what he works through in the story. What does Simon see in him? I never knew. To the story's credit neither does George, and he's explicitly amazed and humbled by it.

Of course with all time-travel narratives there are practical hurdles to overcome that Author Collett largely sidesteps (a good choice in my opinion) by using the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. It takes a good third of the book for George to think about the *way* he was transported to 1300 instead of the *why* of it. The "how" really makes all the difference. If you don't know how you got somewhere how do you ever figure out how to leave?

And about George...his historical ignorance lands him at a point he knows literally not one thing about, which fact freaks him out. As does the language the locals speak. It's a clever resolution to that giant, existentially threatening fact that earns the book its half-star bump. I'm not quite fully on board with the dragon being what it was, nor with the resolution this provided. That's the missing three-quarters of the fifth star. Both of those opinions are the remaining cavils I have to this funny, often rib-ticklingly so, story of a fish so far out of water he might as well be an octopus on Everest.

George's many mistreatments in modern times, most of which seemed to me to stem from his utter inability to see what people were quite plainly after from him, snap into focus when he's chucked into a medieval dungeon. How his life changes from there is a ride through a decade of the most torturous kind of therapy (pun very much intended) in a short time, with the steadying hand of Simon to hold. Why Simon does not get a PoV is...well, I missed it, so I'll leave it at that. The publisher compares this to Less, a book I deeply disliked; it's an apt comparison. George has a little more reason to feel whinging moaning self-pity, being trapped (?) 700 years in the past at a time he knows nothing about. It's the best thing that's ever happened to him. He needs to be shook. What could shake you more than being gay, alone, ad then finding a partner and a purpose and a core after being moved through time and meeting a dragon? He's the safest time traveler ever because he's too ignorant to cause any paradoxes. He's marginal in his life and marginal in the past; it's not like anyone would much miss him, but here in 1300 he's been through horrors yet found purpose and a shot at lasting, imperfect cobbled-together(!) happiness.

What I wanted but lacked in The Ministry of Time I wanted here too, but there was enough fun sex between George and Simon that I'm more forgiving. Oh yeah...sex...eww-ick homophobes should not even consider this story. At all.

It's a journey of self-discovery in a way I didn't expect, wasn't fully on board with, yet related to and resonated with. A bit like the Franklin's Tale from the other end of the fourteenth century, it's a bit overwrought; a bit overinterested in sex for its plot; but, overall, the message of self-discovery and giving one's self permission to live with purpose, well worth reading.

A COIN FOR THE FERRYMAN, interesting exploration of timeless male arrogance

A COIN FOR THE FERRYMAN
MEGAN EDWARDS
Imbrifex Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The story can now be told.

In 1999, an elite interdisciplinary team headed by Nobel laureate Andrew Danicek gathered in California to carry out a ground-breaking time-travel experiment. While the rest of the world remained unaware, Julius Caesar was successfully transported from the last day of his life to a specially-constructed covert facility. Four days of conversation with historians and Latin scholars were planned, followed by Caesar’s return to the moment from which he was extracted. But despite the team’s meticulous efforts to maintain secrecy and plan for all possible exigencies, a kidnap attempt plunges Caesar into peril. Fully aware that the future of civilization may hang in the balance, one team member must summon strength she didn’t know she possessed to return Caesar to the Ides of March.

The shocking details of Caesar's visit and its effect on subsequent events have been protected by draconian nondisclosure agreements....until now.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd wondered, as I set out to read this time-travel/alternate history story, if I was instead going to get an academia/tech sector skulduggery thriller-lite. In a way I did; but that's how the author seduced me into investing in the characters. Sneaky sneaky, you storytelling devil you...but also very clever.

I got invested in the people, their desires and foibles, before I was confronted with the disbelief hurdle of physical time travel. (It's not possible until our energy budget expands multiple times current (!) limitations.) I might've never finished this quite enjoyable book had that not been the order of operations. I'm willing to go into fantasyland if I'm following people I've become interested in.The infighting and interpersonal politicking kept me invested and ready for more.

Then Caesar, a man born into pinnacles of privilege the Proud Boys can only dream of, arrives on the scene.

Never mind the technology is unrealistic...this is fiction. I was clangingly dropped to the decking by the man's apparent mental flexibility, of which there was no sign in history. See Commentarii de Bello Gallico if you doubt this. His own words, admittedly written for an audience, condemn him for a chauvinist Roman-centric genocidal maniac...out-Hitlers Hitler all day every day. Trump and his clown-car of cynical sycophants are the rankest...term used advisedly...of amateurs (kidnapping the sitting president of another country?! what could possibly go wrong?) in comparison.

Yet this era-defining man of destiny accepts the technology and the social reality...conversing with a woman he's neither related to, nor married to, nor a common whore without a blink!...of this century with apparent ease.

I don't buy it.

It caused a long hiatus in my reading. I was not best pleased by the very detailed and slightly overdone explanatory elements of the storytelling signally failing to reveal the massive cognitive shock anyone would experience in these circumstances not being addressed at all; I can certainly see not foregrounding it given the story the author wants to tell.

Hubris and overweening self-regard are blatantly on display in every era's politics and technology sectors. No progress ever made has been free of them; no disaster ever inflicted on the world and her people has ever not stemmed from them. They are present in, are central to, this narrative. It's what ultimately drew me back to finish the read in 2025. I can't say I'm over the moon or ecstatic with the read, but I liked a lot about it...Cassandra being a classicist, really, was both sticking point and advantage as the Latin bits being translated went from implausibility trap to logical extension of the character's expertise. But it was a knife's edge. That pretty much sums up my experience of the read: always on a knife's edge between a low three stars and touching the ragged edge of four stars.

You see where I settled. You'll do your own thinking about what it means, decide whether or not to include this tale of hubris and arrogance through time on your own TBR.

THE PARADOX HOTEL, rollicking good time-travel story

THE PARADOX HOTEL
ROB HART
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$4.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Witty, fun dialogue describing a very standard plot. I'm not complainig, I'm explaining. If you like our Unstuck heroine,January Cole, you'll like the whole effort. I liked her; I think most of y'all might as well. If you're not all lemon-puckered about SF, you might already know Author Rob's work from The Warehouse. (Plenty of subtext in that sentence if you know what you're looking for.)

"Unstuck"? Um, well, yeah...it's a time-travel book, featuring some yucky trillionaire types without morals or scruples, who can afford their very own access to time travel:

“There’s this saying, about people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple,” I tell him. “About the way people inherit wealth and power and think that not only did they earn it, but they deserve it. We deal with a different sort in this place. People who were born on third base and think they built the stadium.”

A consequence of developing time travel is that some people come "Unstuck" from their roots in...whatever Time is...hence are "Unstuck." Think The Time Traveler's Wife, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like all the best time-travel stories, those and this one are about bigger things, grief, the idea of inequality, the process of identity versus the certainties most of us crave for identity to provide...y'know, Life.

Author Rob digs in, plays it out, makes us care while taking our little teeny Stuck selves through a mad, whirling, loud maelstrom of voices and ideas. January lost Mena, grieves for her, but...what does loss really mean to someone Unstuck? Why is everything everywhere here and why is now all at once? With time crimes to solve, security professional January needs to track everyone and through the everywhere that is the Paradox Hotel...which is being sold in the process of the US Government privatizing the ability to time travel, just to add some more complexity.

And who's the dead guy in room 526 that no one else can see?

All of these are questions January needs to solve/resolve. It's the only focus she has that can override her desperate, raging grief for Mena. And it might keep her employed at the Paradox Hotel.

And alive. All because she's Unstuck, so the only one who *can* do it all.

I don't offer a fifth star because the humor is often bitter, sometimes forced, and always facetious. I resonate with most of it. I love Jodi Taylor's emotionally intense, very funny books; they're happy humor, laughing...sometimes mordantly...together with the story. In Author Rob's work, we stand outside and laugh at things with January. It can feel off-putting. So no fifth star for you.

It's still a really good time for the right mood, the right reader, the right moment. Look into it!

EXQUISITE THINGS, time-travel immortality and True Love your thing? Here 'tis!

EXQUISITE THINGS
ABDI NAZEMIAN
HarperCollins (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Stonewall Award–winning author Abdi Nazemian (Only This Beautiful Moment) comes the epic queer love story of a lifetime. Perfect for fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Shahriar believes he was born in the wrong time. All he’s ever wanted is to love and be loved, but 1895 London doesn’t offer him the freedom to be his true self, and Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency has only reaffirmed that. But one night—and one writer—will grant Shahriar what he’s always wished for: the opportunity to live in a time and place where he can love freely. Rechristened as Shams and then as Bram, he finds what feels like eternal happiness. But can anything truly be eternal?

Oliver doesn’t feel that 1920s Boston gives him a lot of options to be his full self. He knows he could only ever love another boy, but that would break his beloved mother’s heart. Oliver finds freedom and acceptance in the secret queer community at Harvard that his cousin introduces him to. When he meets a mysterious boy with eyes as warm as a flame, his life is irrevocably changed, forever.

Spanning one hundred and thirty years of love and longing, this tale of immortal beloveds searching for their perfect place and time is a vibrant hymn to the beauty of being alive, a celebration of queer love and community, and a reminder that behind every tragic thing that ever existed, there is something exquisite.

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My Review: It's a tale as old as time: boy longs for True Love; the gods hear him, and grant his wish, with the catch that he can't have him; something, no specific Power attached, says "...but you will live to meet him," and Oscar's your uncle you're living out Dorian Gray's life!

Immortality seems a terrible curse to me, when plodding through another Thursday can feel like Hell or at least Purgatory. In this case, at least poor Shahriyar (I went to high school with a queer guy named Shahriyar, wonder whatever became of him?)...going by Shams makes a lot of sense to me with a name like that in Anglophone, Victorian London, better still Bram...gets rewarded by living through very, very interesting times indeed.

The central thesis of the immortality...thing...seemed to me to have a sharp cutting edge in freezing the boys at seventeen. How awful to have adult-strength emotions, unmitigated by adult perspective! The angsty solipsism of eternal youth sounds horrifying to my closer-to-70-than-50 self. We follow them through three timelines in their immortal journey, and spend enough time in each to know they *are* seventeen in them all. It presents the expected problems...remember your dating life at seventeen? *shudder*...but the basic truth of Bram/Shahriyar and Oliver's lives is that they are in love with each other. Men come, men go, but these boys come back into orbit around each other because they're each made the way the other needs a man to be.

It takes forever, it seems, but they own up to their own nonsense and discuss their love of each others' essence, so a lot of the silly acting out does get dealt with. It's thus not purely the angsty nonsense of trying to figure out what works. A lot of time spent doing it, though....

I had procedural questions like I always do in immortality stories...how'd they survive the 1980s with databases and licenses and passports and birth certificates? how'd they get bank accounts? credit cards?...but mostly this book is for the reader to enjoy True Love that withstands the fallibility and failings of human beings. The supporting cast is a hoot and a holler. I think any one of 'em would tentpole a novella at least! Still, my niggles lost a half-star off the read. I wasn't swept up enough not to notice them until I thought about it after the read; these were in-the-moment grumbles.

My reason for dropping the majority of fifth star, though, was the ending...cramming way too much into way too little space made me feel like the author saw someone over my shoulder he'd rather talk to and just dropped me. Either adding 50-60 more pages onto this book or splitting the story and make it two volumes would address that rushed, inelegant ending.

Good fun was had, a very satisfying evening of smiling nodding shouting at the pages...not perfect, but what is?

FLUX, a hard-to-believe-it's-a-debut novel about identity, grief, and Otherness

FLUX
JINWOO CHONG
Melville House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his employers have inadvertently discovered time travel and are covering up a string of violent crimes.

Combining elements of neo-noir, speculative fiction, and '80s detective shows, FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ling Ma’s Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters —Bo, Brandon and Blue— who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control.

* After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family.

* 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls.

* 48-year-old Blue participates in a television exposé of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length.

Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves?

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My Review: Creative uses of the time-travel plot don't grow on trees. This one, with its interesting way of weaving Eighties pop cultural touchstones...not, I hasten to say, specifics...lends the proceedings an air of cyberpunk coolth, removed from the moist, sweaty realities of Life.

I suspect that the air of remove was meant to aid in the project of obscuring a fact that was blindingly obvious to me from the off: These three people are one person, albeit the kind of one-person idea that a time-travel-adjacent story produces. It's a good use of the overdone time-travel trope. I was not, however, in any doubt about the fact. I don't know of my own personal knowledge that one is meant not to see this, though the clues point to that being the author's intent.

If I have a gripe about the storytelling, it's Brandon addressing the hero of Raider in the satanic second person. I hate that. It was acceptable...barely...because it wasn't ambiguous who was being addressed, therefore it never ran afoul of my loathing for having an authorial finger poked in my chest.

As a record of how one man integrates the pain of a past that was marred by loss into a present that is ruled by betrayal, the story fires on all cylinders. As a story about the way we anchor ourselves in the ever-shifting emotional landscape of our life, it stands out from the crowd. As a gentle admonition for men to do the work of coming to terms with the emotional baggage they, we, all carry it is effective in its use of pop-culture tropes and constructs to embody the risks of not doing so.

Ambitious and clever and emotionally literate, it was a fine experiment in telling a story about the cost to a man of failing to connect with his own feelings as well as the roots of his identity as a man. Fathers are routinely absent from sons' lives in every way possible in fiction. It's not new territory broken here, either. It's not much explored, more reported, so there's little emotional heft in this take. I wasn't surprised by this though the structure of the time-travel bits made me think this was a missed opportunity. In a story that focuses on pains from loss, why not get into it?

The fact that the betrayal plot I've alluded to comes from Brandon's job being among the tech scum was *chef's kiss* to me. It enabled Author Chong to deal with the orientalism surrounding a lot of tech-centered fiction. It's largely unreflective, most tech narrative use, simply making characters from East or south Asian backgrounds. Here we delve into that identity and its costs more than usual, adding to the mix the character's queerness. That aspect alone wins Author Chong a major reprieve from chastisement for minor amounts of failure to explore satisfyingly some paths he starts down.

I hope all y'all will give this ambitious, quite successful, debut novel of identity, grieving for selves and lives not lived, and coming to terms with one's actual life through fiction, a whirl.

ESPERANCE, alt-hist/many-worlds Chicago noir thriller

ESPERANCE
ADAM OYEBANJI
DAW Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science Fiction!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The history-bending speculative fiction from Adam Oyebanji, award-winning author of BRAKING DAY.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.

An incredible quest: As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.

An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.

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My Review: Why you're reading this story will largely color your response to it. SFF readers might not vibe with the very significant police-procedural elements narrated by noirish Ethan the cop. Mystery readers might not love the time-travel, in the many-worlds sense, done by Abi the morally grey alternating PoV.

I'm the reader with a foot and nine toes in each of those camps, plus another entire foot in the alternate-history camp. (There are so three feet! Where? In between worlds where the vibrational body exists and has access to all body parts. Quit quibbling, this has two guys who drowned in the ocean discovered dead in their Chicago apartment!)

I'm so glad to read a thriller inflected with quantum reality, which I am all about in my reading. It felt a bit like Author Oyebanji decided this would be his book, and spent his time plotting the story to the detriment of developing either Abi or Ethan more fully. I'm okay with that because the resolution to the crime we're here to read about was so exactly aimed at me and my personal hobbyhorses. I disliked the detective Ethan's racism being foregrounded. It didn't cause any stars to disappear, but it did make me squirm. As I think that was the point of including it, I mention the fact of it for reader guidance.

Abi's intriguing back/foreground was something I'd read a whole book about all by itself. Hollie, the sidekick, was so pathetically enamored of Abi that it got a little uncomfortable. I mean, I totally get it, and I was a little bit there, too. /but really cringe, Author Oyebanji, in that last bit about gbese.

What the gestalt of the book did not have, as I mentioned above, feels as though it was designed out by the author to leave the fundamental rocks under the story...not revenge, not even forgiveness can leach sin clean...in brightest contrast. It worked for me, I think it might work for all y'all who like your stories sleek, clear, and propulsively paced.

Four and a half shiny, happy stars.

A LINE YOU HAVE TRACED, lesbian-led Cloud Atlas riposte, only done truly well

A LINE YOU HAVE TRACED
ROISIN DUNNETT
The Feminist Press at CUNY (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cloud Atlas meets This Is How You Lose the Time War in this gorgeous speculative novel that explores how a mysterious red journal connects three women born centuries apart in East London.

In the Jewish East End of post-World War I London, Bea, a young shopkeeper's wife, is visited by an uncanny figure she believes is an angel. She tries to understand the meaning of these visits as the life she is building with her new husband is threatened by fascists who are increasingly targeting her friends and neighbors.

Kay spends nights partying with her friends in contemporary East London's underground queer scene, where one of them is gaining fame as a drag queen. She entertains herself by imagining that people she passes on the street are time travelers who have come back in time specifically to visit her. As she becomes infatuated with the brilliant O, she discovers an aged red notebook that seems to be the journal of an ancestor who was also visited by a mystical being.

One hundred years in the future, against a backdrop of climate emergency and violent oppression, Ess lives off the grid as part of a collective that's planning for the end of human life on Earth. After uncovering an ancient worn red book in an archive, she is invited to a nearby commune to help with a critical journey into the past to possibly help save the present.

Epic in scope, with unforgettable characters and a rare clarity of vision, A Line You Have Traced asks profound questions about how we might survive and engage with the world, and with each other before it’s too late.

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My Review: I was not the biggest booster of Cloud Atlas, book or film. Ambitious, complex, occasionally obscure...I've mellowed in the decade-plus since it showed up and no longer assert "obscurantist"...that work was not for me.

Maybe add lesbians and I'll find its plot charming?

Tuna, Mackerel and Sardine (the c-a-t-s) almost derailed the exercise in rehabilitation.

The past, present, and future gag is retreaded for this iteration with queer text, in place of the far more prevalent subtext, and set in motion by the unfolding traumas of each era's culture and all leading into the future's existential changes threatening civilization. It works well because it simultaneously provides perspective and focuses the reader onto the severity of the stakes overall.

Turns out adding lesbians, just like in life, fixes most things.

No fifth star from me because, do I need to say it, c-a-t-s. Be impressed and amazed it didn't knock my usual four-and-a-half stars off! The author's got solid writing chops and a very accurate story-laser to get four stars out of me. Telling a story of how each generation feels it's meeting its challenges, showing how they always interconnect, and never giving a single indication that any one of these characters could be straight and still have the same story, is good work indeed.

Go get one. It will please the weirdos who don't hate cats as much as I do solidly more than even me.

SPLINTER EFFECT, watch out St Mary's! New kid is in town

SPLINTER EFFECT (Splinter Effect #1)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this action-packed debut, time traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward maneuvers through the past to recover a long-lost, precious menorah hiding out in ancient Rome.

Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward travels through time on sponsored expeditions to the past to secure precious artifacts moments before they are lost to history. Although exceptional at his job, Rabbit is not without faults. In a spectacular failure twenty years ago, he lost both the menorah of the second temple and his hot-headed mentee, Aaron. So, when new evidence reveals the menorah’s reappearance in 6th century Constantinople, Rabbit seizes the chance for redemption.

But from the moment he arrives in the past, things start to go wrong. Rabbit quickly finds out that his prime competition, an unlicensed and annoyingly appealing “stringer” named Helen, is also in Constantinople hunting the menorah. And that’s only the beginning. The oppressed Jewish population of the city is primed for revolution, Constantinople’s leading gang seems to have it out for Rabbit personally, and someone local is interested enough in the menorah to kill for it.

As the past closes in on him and his previous failures compound, will Rabbit be able to recover the menorah before it's once again lost in time?

With new and old dangers alike hiding behind every corner, time might just be up for Rabbit’s redemption—and possibly his life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Jodi Taylor's St Mary's series might need to smarten up their extremely British...let's be honest, English...monomania if Rabbit of the Smithsonian catches on. Much as I love Max, Peterson, and Markham, they need some competition, and here they've got it.

Opening at (one of the several events leading to) the burning of the Library of Alexandria was a genius bait-and-switch. By itself that is an event I would, and have, eagerly read a book about, but here it's only a teaser for Rabbit and his relationship to the Smithsonian. Time travel, inherently threatening to powerful people, is here presented as a tech tightly wrapped in rules. Of course these favor the status quo, and the very, very rich. But I repeat myself...Rabbit's a nepo baby with some time-travel failures behind him including a search for the maguffin in this book, the menorah stolen by Rome from the Jews. It's a real white-whale tale, and not just for Rabbit.

Helen, his antagonist, is also hot for this (solid-gold) candelabra of god's. She's not at all as well-developed as Rabbit is, and frankly I hope they drop her in any future iterations of the book...I didn't like Clive Ronan either (IYKYK). Their reasons aren't explored. I don't think they matter. After all, it's made of gold so greed's more than enough. Here's probably a good place to note that the world as we know it is part of a multiverse. In this splinter (note resemblance to title), there's legal-but-restricted time travel. In others, there's none whether legal or not. You see how immense this storyverse is? Imagine for a moment the things a writer can do in this sandbox!

Earlier versions of this idea have mostly centered around the Time Patrol (Poul Anderson) or The Paratime Police (H. Beam Piper) tasked with preventing anyone from causing time loops or retrocausal gubbins or generally being dickish to our hominin ancestors. (I think it's telling that intertemporal stories about Homo sapiens interacting with any earlier species, or even earlier time in history, all contain some fraud or slavery elements.)

Here the only thing remotely criminal is, arguably, the richest benefiting from Rabbit and his ilk going into the past to retrieve things that're lost to history by idiotic violence, sheer human stupidity, or Earth's natural processes (eg, earthquakes or fires). I'm not squeamish enough about this to give the book a black mark. I *am* squeamish about young, hot Helen being Rabbit's nemesis and Doctor PJ being his girlfriend, because absolutely nothing can be left un-romance-ified and of course that means heterosexual. Ugh. There went a half-star. (Though, to be fair, there are hints that Rabbit himself might be, um, heteroflexible.)

The other half-star disappeared because, though I liked the richly detailed world of 536 Constantinople a lot, I'd've liked more people instead of labels talking. It feels more like infidumping when I have no idea who "the customs official" or any of the other so-yclept faceless ones are. Still, four stars is the absolute minimum a book with this ending could possibly receive. Even moreso because, if this isn't a series-starter, I'll eat my hat for breakfast without ketchup.

I'll be right here waiting for more Rabbit. Without a ketchup bottle.

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO, a deeply pleasurable read for my Frontera-raised self

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO
LUIS JARAMILLO
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lawyer and her elderly great-aunt use their supernatural gifts to find a lost child in this richly imagined and empowering story of motherhood, magic, and legacy in the vein of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and La Hacienda.

If you call to the witches, they will come.

1943, El Paso, teenager Nena spends her days caring for the small children of her older sisters, while longing for a life of freedom and adventure. The premonitions and fainting spells she has endured since childhood are getting worse, and Nena worries she’ll end up like the scary old curandera down the street. Nena prays for help, and when the mysterious Sister Benedicta arrives late one night, Nena follows her across the borders of space and time. In colonial Mexico, Nena grows into her power, finding love and learning that magic always comes with a price.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

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My Review: So satisfying. Slow and intricate, deep and wise. I'm sure some will find the woven timelines...no definitive breaks or obtrusive tricks mark the shifts in the timeline...to be deal-breakingly imprecise, but to me that made this like an oral performace of a mythic tale. I will say that, as this is also a review of the book meant to instruct others in its merits, I've nicked a half-star off because this pigeonholes the Perfect Reader a bit overly finely.

I don't always love it when men take it upon themselves to write about motherhood. Author Jaramillo manages to do this feat without making the commonest mistakes men fall into: flattening the narrative scope into a litany of caretaking chores or glossing over these same chores. The effect is the same either end of the spectrum. It makes the work of motherhood into insignificant triviality. I hasten to add that many women writers have done the same, Gone Girl being a notable example. In this book, caretaking, mothering, is literally everywhere and yet this didn't obtrude into my consciousness until I was reviewing my notes before writing this review.

That's well-done prosody...I'm in the sounds of the story not in the structure of it. As these are the sounds of la frontera, where I grew up, I fell right in and did not notice it. Very well done indeed, Author Jaramillo.

I don't think any one thing worked more in favor of the book than Nena's manner of explaining the past to her modern, harried granddaughter, not as a place of beautiful memories but of deeds undine and consequences unmet. Business to be finished dominates every life, none moreso than that of the oldest among us. I resonated like a struck bell to this thread of the tapestry woven for me.

As a way to add some occult flavor and Hispanic culture to your #Deathtober reading, this works very well. As a lovely story of the intense bonds of a loving family woman, forced by bitter circumstance to choose actions permanent and irremediable, making amends as best she can, it's gloriously satisfying.

Read soonest.

THE BOOK OF WITCHING, the kind of horror that keeps me awake

THE BOOK OF WITCHING
C.J. COOKE
Berkley Books
$19.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.

Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The dual-timeline haters are duly warned: this novel uses that technique in an absolutely inescapable way. It's not a gimmick to improve pacing...it's integral to the story, and deployed in a way you invest in right away, or really dislike instantly. It does not change for the entire book so be advised of that if you do not like it on contact.

The initial horror set-up, a mother hearing that her daughter who was off on an adventure holiday is now in the hospital, scared me enough. "It can't get worse than this," thought innocent little me. Your kid's in a burn unit far away. You have to get there, worried out of your mind. Your beloved only child is, when you can finally speak to her, someone else...or so she says. "It can not get worse than this," I shuddered.

Had I but known....

I don't go in for supernatural stories, witches and devils and suchlike silliness. If something supernatural like that existed, I'd've seen it for myself in these past *cough*ty-*mumble* years. Ain't happened. Weird shit, yes; devils and gods and miracles, nope. None of that kind of horror is here, either. It's all the slimy rottenness of Humanity. It's all the horrible stench of misogyny. It's all greed and control at their ugliest and most personal.

Just in somehow linked points in past and present.

That's as far as suspension of disbelief will take me, so I'm glad that's as far as we went. There's nothing but a truly unnervingly described...talisman? power focus?...wisely left ambiguous. If one wants a supernatural explanation for these weirdly entwined events so distant from each other in time, there's a way to see that; there's also nothing that requires it to have that explanation, and the horror in the story told is of human origin.

That made it just right for me to read this #Deathtober, and is why I gave it four stars. I found Clem's anguish and confusion horrifying because they're totally relatable. Her child, a new mother herself, is wounded terribly in body and quite possibly irretrievably in psyche. That could not possibly be worse, except evil Author Cooke made it scarier by introducing elements that are outside normal parameters.

Parents of teens strongly cautioned.

EDELWEISS+ MYSTERIES/THRILLERS/CRIME STORIES: Burgoines to read for #Deathtober 2024

CALICO by LEE GOLDBERG

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Goldberg, comes an explosive, page-turning investigative thriller - with a mind-blowing twist.

There's a saying in Barstow, California, a decaying city in the scorching Mojave desert . . .

The Interstate here only goes in one direction: Away.

But it's the only place where ex-LAPD detective Beth McDade, after a staggering fall from grace, could get another badge . . . and a shot at redemption.

Over a century ago, and just a few miles further into the bleak landscape, a desperate stranger ended up in Calico, a struggling mining town, also hoping for a second chance.

His fate, all those years ago, and hers today are linked when Beth investigates an old skeleton dug up in a shallow, sandy grave . . . and also tries to identity a vagrant run-over by a distracted motorhome driver during a lightning storm.

Every disturbing clue she finds, every shocking discovery she makes, force Beth to confront her own troubled past—and a past that's not her own—until it all smashes together in a revelation that could change the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Entertaining fluff to pass an afternoon. The kind of read that scratches the same "tell me a story but don't make me think too hard" that television has historically specialized in. In fact, this'd make a *great* Movie of the Week, whatever we're calling those now. Netflix Originals? Prime Videos?

Any road, there's a lot less here than meets the eye in substantive themes, but who cares? Read it for the sci-fi-lite elements, the interesting Western US setting (problems and all), and the relatable characters. But seriously, Author Goldberg..."Ben Cartwright"? SMH

Severn House wants $6.99 for the Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link), a reasonable price for the fun I had.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


The Labyrinth House Murders (House Murders #3) by Yukito Ayatsuji (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: THE TWISTY AND INGENIOUS FOURTH INSTALLEMENT IN THE BIZARRE HOUSE MYSTERIES.

The famed mystery writer Miyagaki Yotaro lives a life of seclusion in the remote Labyrinth House. When Yotaro invites four young crime authors to his home for a birthday party, they are honoured to accept. But no sooner have they arrived than they are confronted with a shocking death, then lured into a bizarre, deadly competition…

As the twisted contest gathers pace, murder follows murder. The ingenious sleuth Shimada Kiyoshi investigates, but can he solve the mystery of the house before all those trapped in its labyrinth are dead? And can you guess the solution before he does?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This entry in the ongoing series is billed as the third and the fourth in it (see above synopsis), and as I don't speak Japanese I can't be certain which it actually is. Since the original publication date was in 1988, it ought to be easier than this.

Truly doesn't matter to the reading pleasure of the book, so I suppose the now-normal lie that "this series can be read in any order" is, for once, true. Do take note that this is NOT a fair-play mystery, as there's at least two details crucial to resolving the plot that are not given to you, or even hinted at.

What the read does, however, is to take you through a very well-constructed labyrinth. Playing Theseus is entertaining when the stakes are 1) completing your in-progress novel and b) inheriting cash and copyrights from a very well-known mystery writer. Adjusting expectations this way presents a good day's entertainment.

Pushkin Vertigo brings this out either on 10 October 2024 or 13 May 2025. Either way it's a preorder, so check prices with your chosen retailer.

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The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas (tr. Lizzie Davis)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After a series of failures, a biologist returns to his hometown to live with his grieving mother. But in this gripping crime novel that upends the genre’s conventions, strange events unravel what he thought he knew of his past, his present, and himself.

When a biologist returns home to Colombia after fifteen years abroad, he quickly becomes entangled in the trappings of his past and his increasingly bizarre present: the unsolved murder of his brother, a drug dealer seeking transcendence, a boarding school where students disappear and girls give birth to strange creatures. An encounter with a well-connected acquaintance leads to a job offer in big agriculture, and he’s gradually drawn into a web of conspiracy. Ultimately, he may be destined to remain in the city he’d hoped never to see again. In The Devil of the Provinces, nothing is as it seems.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It feels a bit like cheating to call this a crime novel on first glance. It took the publisher an afterword essay to make a (flimsy) case for it. But on sober reflection lasting months, I came to agree that this IS a crime novel of a specific sort:

The biologist observed that, as with most extravagant paintings, the fabrication of custodiae had flourished during the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church set in motion its major propaganda operation: the colonization of the senses through artwork. Persuasion wasn't enough anymore, subjugation was the aim. The passage from education to spectacle, evangelization to fanaticism. These images were made to trap the eye and flood it with vibration, illusions of movement, space-time dislocation.

The crimes committed, a murdered brother and a drug-dealing bestie (nothing solves the murder, no punishment accrues to the dealer) aside, are the truly vile crimes of misusing language and power to manipulate and control others for fun and profit. The criminals are both persons and institutions, as always in the annals of crime.

That's all told in the voice you read above; you'll like it or not, I very much do, but it takes time and a strong willingness to engage with the vocabulary to glean the story's full affect.

Coffee House Press asks $17.95 (non-affiliate Amazon link) for one. The library's free. Unless you fell in love with the sample go check it out...but read it. This is a tendentious meditation on what a true true crime is.

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Alcatraz Ghost Story: Roy Gardner's Amazing Train Robberies, Escapes, and Lifelong Love by Brian Stannard

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The Incredible True Story of the Most Hunted Man in Pacific Coast History—and the Woman He Loved

Before the 1920s found their roar, a charismatic gambling addict named Roy Gardner dominated news headlines with daring train robberies and escapes from incarceration. Nicknamed "the Smiling Bandit," Gardner spilled no blood—except his own—as he cut a felonious path across the western United States, as the country hobbled through a recession in the aftermath of the First World War.

Once imprisoned for the long term in federal prisons, including Alcatraz, the most notorious prison's second-most-notorious inmate won over some unlikely champions. Both Gardner's wife, Dollie, and a police officer who once arrested him launched extensive campaigns for Gardner's release on the vaudeville circuit, claiming a brain operation would cure his lawless ways. Was Gardner a good man who made bad decisions as the victim of injury and circumstance? Or was his charming personality merely the poker face of a scoundrel?

Richly researched, drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts, Alcatraz Ghost Story explores the life of Roy Gardner in the context of his great love story and the larger backdrop of drug addiction, incarceration, and the racial and labor violence of the 1920s and 1930s.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: An uneven true-crime story, one that reminded me of the old film Falling Down. How hard can you push a fundamentally decent man with charm and charisma until he gives violently up on The System?

Add the fillip of never being quite sure which Gardner was the fundamental one, the sales whiz charmer or the criminal manipulator, and you have a catchy book. My rating reflects mostly a dissatisfaction with the choppy pacing...we slow down to discuss historical events that end up being peripheral to the story, eg World War I bond drives, and gloss over things I'd like to hear more about, eg life in/on Alcatraz...rather than the research, or the story being told.

(Also I deeply dislike his One True Love, Dollie...shallow Babbitty broad.)

Skyhorse Publishing is asking $19.99 for a Kindle edition. (non-affiliate Amazon link)

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Saving Myles by Carl Vonderau

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When the FBI can’t help, an unassuming banker takes matters into his own hands to bring his son home

Wade, a respected banker in La Jolla, CA, and his estranged wife, Fiona, make the unbearable decision to send their teenage son, Myles, away to an expensive treatment center after a streak of harmful behavior. After a year of treatment, Myles comes home, seemingly rehabilitated. But soon, he sneaks off to Tijuana to buy drugs—and is kidnapped.

When the ransom call comes, Fiona is frantic and accepts help from Andre, the Quebecois whose charity Fiona runs. Wade is wary of Andre’s reputation and the bank he owns, but seeing no other way to secure a kidnap negotiator or the ransom, he swallows his doubts to get his son home.

In order to get the ransom money, Wade makes a deal with Andre—he’ll work for Andre’s bank in exchange for the cash. But as Wade races to rescue Myles before his kidnappers lose their patience, he realizes he’s wrapped up in more crime than just a kidnapping—he’s now indebted to a cartel.

Perfect for fans of Harlan Coben and Lisa Scottoline.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kid-in-jeopardy thriller, with Dad chasing after his kidnapped teen son for a change. Usual useless woman trope found too often in male-oriented thrillers: his ex-wife involves a villain so obvious he should twirl his mustachios, which—shock twist!—makes everything harder for Dad to fix.

I want to belt the idiot kid upside his head for being such a shit. The writing's good, the pacing's propulsive, the publisher's comps are spot-on.

Oceanview Publishing asks $9.49 (non-affiliate Amazon link) for a Kindle edition. Go to the library, says I.

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The Belgrade Conspiracy: A David Rivers Thriller (Shadow Strike #6) by Jason Kasper

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: **FROM FORMER GREEN BERET AND USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR JASON KASPER**

A lethal shipment of military hardware. An international terrorist group on a mission of mass destruction. One man stands to forever change the course of history…unless David Rivers can stop him.

David Rivers is an expert in the art of violence. Together with his team of CIA operatives, he's executed dozens of covert assassinations―but this mission might turn out to be his deadliest yet. One man stands behind the transfer of high-level military hardware to an international terrorist syndicate.

The CIA has uncovered his identity: Yuri Sidorov, a Russian arms dealer with state protection. With the arms deal only days away, David and the team are faced with an impossible to get close enough to take out their target, they must first win his trust. David and the team infiltrate a black market arms network in Serbia, negotiating a web of secret police and mafia hitmen. Each wrong turn may prove fatal, but they're determined to succeed at any cost. But Sidorov is still alive for a reason, and when the team uncovers dark forces at work in the Balkans and America, they realize that killing him is the least of their worries. By the time they learn the truth, it's too late…and now they're the ones being hunted.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I knew when I asked for this read it was #6 in a series, but let's be honest. It's a military thriller. The characters are fairly interchangeable in the genre, they're archetypes: Tech genius, spycraft maven, violent guy...nobody really needs to know much except the outlines to follow along. It's stakes and pacing that matter in this genre.

Still true. If your idea of fun is taking a fast-paced ride through some unfamiliar world locations, here's you a violent, nationalistic read. Guilty pleasure, for me at least, and not a series I'll be pursuing.

Severn River Publishing wants $6.99 for a Kindlebook. (non-affiliate Amazon link)

THE MINISTRY OF TIME, a review I feel guilty for writing

THE MINISTRY OF TIME
KALIANE BRADLEY
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Interview with Kaliane Bradley by New Scientist on their YouTube channel. There's a six-episode BBC adaptation via A24 on the way!

The Publisher Says: A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I know how petty and spoiled I'm going to sound in this review, but I can't, in good conscience, ignore this extremely promising debut novel. I'm a complete sucker for time-travel novels and stories, and all the weirdness that accompanies the (incorrect, in my opinion) History-changing antics of time travelers. (I think there are many worlds in the multiverse.) The notion here presented of making use of the lives of those who died too soon for Other Ends is one with a lot of appeal to me.

And yet this is a five-star idea in a four-star book. I love the idea! I like the execution because it's not fussy, doesn't cram in irrelevancies but *does* offer squads and fleets of enriching details, both about the past and the story-present, just a bit down our own road. So what's wrong?

She makes the spy story an excuse to tell this fundamentally romantic story, not this idea to propel a spy story. The way it's resolved is good just not great, and that's down to the wrong-endedness of the grasp. Nameless Narratrix is, it's absurdly evident from the get-go, going to fall in love with her new "expat" (coy bureaucratese for "kidnapped time-traveling hostage") and they are going to Do the Deed. I'm on record as not liking heterosex in my life, no matter where it comes from, so this was never going to work for me. But after thinking a lot about this book and its wonderful humor, its inventive take on the purposes of time travel, and its very well-limned characters, I realized I'd be just as tetchy if Nameless had been a man bedding a man the way god intended.

The problem for me is that I think the romantic plot is just too similar to the squads and fleets of inferior iterations of Outlander that litter the romance-reader's landscape. Why do more of the same? Well, in this case, because 1) it sells, and b) it's vastly...enormously...better-done than anything else in its competition.

But here's whiny little me, moaning "just leave it out!" as Nameless and her "expat" have headboard-smashing sex. Y'all are voting with your wallets, the book's a hit and rightly so! But it isn't the book I wanted.

Hence four, not five, stars. And my shamefaced admission that this is NOT the review that this book merited.